Witness - Voices from the Holocaust

Description:For the past twenty years, the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University has sought to preserve the human side of the inhuman era of the Holocaust by video-taping testimonies from those who lived through it. This project has led to an acclaimed documentary film and this extraordinary book. A single and compelling narrative is woven from the first-person accounts of 27 witnesses, including Jews, Gentiles, Americans, a member of the Hitler Youth, a Jesuit priest, resistance fighters, and child survivors. They tell stories of life under the Nazis, in the ghettos, concentration camps, and death camps, and they recount the mixed emotions that accompanied liberation and the following years. Their experiences reveal what it is like to live in a world where there were no clear moral options, and most choices were between bad and worse; and even for survivors there were no happy endings. Vivid, detailed and impassioned, their words lend immediacy to events that resonate to this day.